--- title: Grails Reviews meta_title: 'Grails Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 33 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Grails works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.6 review_count: 33 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-07' parent_category: name: Web Frameworks url: https://www.g2.com/categories/web-frameworks --- # Grails Reviews **Vendor:** The Grails Project **Category:** [Java Web Frameworks](https://www.g2.com/categories/java-web-frameworks) **Average Rating:** 3.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 33 ## About Grails A powerful Groovy-based web application framework for the JVM ## Grails Reviews ### 1. Best framework to for APIs and every component is isolated and connected in best way **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Every things is configurable and each component is in perfect isolation with other. If implemented properly - this is the best framework. **What do you dislike about Grails?** other ORM support and application monitoring tool which will ensure best practice is implemented **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** The development cycles will be short - please check the post deployment behaviour on stage before going into production. Some times there CPU spikes despite writing best possible code. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** worked in food-tech and BFS products and benefit is that you just get started with the framework - if an experience person is using this, then he/she will understand the luxury of coding in Grails compared to other frameworks. ### 2. Grails is easy to start, hard to deep in. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Liangliang Z. | 开发主管, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** 0. Can use any existed java library. 1. Groovy 's advantage (than java): (0) Metaprogramming (1) more efficient operators ( Elvis operator, Safe navigation operator etc. ) (2) more useful method to JDK classes ( such as Collection#find()), more (3) can use much DSL ( can do same things with less code) 2. GORM is the bettern than using mybatis/hibernate in java app development. 3. easy to conver between map,list and json,xml. 4. Gsp is better than jsp——but I more intend not to use both at all. Instead, Grails app should response json data only. Html page can be developed by another app (using sass, angularJs, gulpjs etc), using ajax or jsonp to access json data. **What do you dislike about Grails?** 0. Most grails's plugin not better enough, less actived, lack document, obsoleted. e.g. : (1) I prefer to use RestTemplate,UriComponentsBuilder provided by SpringFramework —— which is simple enough, solid, can be used in both java and groovy, rather than Grails REST Plugin (2) I don't think using spring security plugin is better than using Spring Security framework directly in resources.groovy —— Because , beside to learn Spring Security framework , I had to lean the plugin too (for debuging problems). Maybe, it should focus on Spring Security's extension, not the configuration? 1. Easy to start, hard to deep in. Grails's wrapped much known Java libray, framework —— such as Spring framework, Spring security, etc。Without much knowledge about Spring Security, I don't think a java/grails beginner can well config the plugin. Only those who had famillar JVM, the libraries Grails used, can play around Grails. 2. Grails 2's build mechanism (Gant, but Grails 3 is using gradle) 3. Grails 2's plugin mechanism (Still studying Grails 3) PS: I also quested what about using Spring Boot + Groovy + GORM (without Grails) —— since most grails module has announced it can be used outside Grails. I'am more familiar SpringFramework. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Electronic Commerce. Make a java/Grails beginner who focus business logic can start development quickly. ### 3. Huge addition to the JVM world **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mathias F. | Senior Software Engineer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I've used Grails for various projects. From full web oriented architectures, to RESTful APIs, even for console applications. Its Convention over Configuration nature makes it extremely quickly to get started with any project and just modify what you need from the initial sensible defaults. Personally, coming from JEE, where you have to edit thousands of XMLs and properties files, it was awesome. Groovy is a very powerful and comfortable language. If you come from Java, you'll find yourself loving it right away. Before choosing Grails, I considered Ruby on Rails, but didn't like having to learn a completely new and wheel-reinventing language. Grails has everything RoR and many other frameworks has, using a familiar language and industry proven backing technologies. **What do you dislike about Grails?** As the community is not as big as others, the documentation is sometimes a bit scarce. Many times I had to fix things by myself, even checking Grails source code and making pull requests to the core team. The plugin ecosystem has the same problem, there are not so many plugins as other frameworks have. I, however, see those disadvantages as some kind of challenge. I love contributing to the community and here there is plenty of room for collaboration. Sometimes having too much is also bad, like Node.js, where you have a hundred ways of doing anything and none of those ways are completely correct. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Use version 2.x, because version 3.x is still very unstable. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** My company used to have a .NET solution that became obsolete and impossible to refactor. I was hired to conduct a migration of the whole system to Grails framework. The learning curve of the developers was very low as they soon starting to see advantages (in the language and in the framework). Things that used to take hundreds of lines of code, were soon replaced with a couple of lines with Groovy's dynamic nature. As per the architecture, it's really easy to design a solution on top of Grails' MVC pattern. The design, frontend and core team work with very little conflict in the same project. ### 4. Develop powerful web applications fast and easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rubén S. | Senior software engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** If you come from Java/Spring the learning curve is quite flat. Grails is based on the concept of "convention over configuration" so if you follow the conventions you get rid of a lot of messy XML files. Apart from this, you have all the power of the Groovy programming language, a much more modern language than Java, that allow the developer to build the business logic in a much more intuitive way. As a summary, when you start to develop with Grails and you see that you have your environment and a running application in 15 minutes you won't leave this framework. **What do you dislike about Grails?** One of the strengths of Grails is as well one of it's weaknesses. Grails can be extended via plugins, that are very useful to add integration with new functionalities, for example Spring-security, LDAP, etc. but sometimes there are so many plugins for one task that you have to choose carefully because some of them only work for specific versions, others are unmaintained, and this can be a problem. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** If you come from Java/Spring/Hibernate world and you want to start a new project give Grails a try, you will be surprised of how fast the things can be built. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I work as software developer in a big travel agency, developing the call center tools / middle office tools. Using Grails we have been able to short the development time, being able to replace an old set of tools with a new tools with all the functionalities integrated in less than a year. As a note some of the developers didn't have experience using Grails but they have become very productive in a very short amount of time. ### 5. My go-to Java web framework **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lee B. | New Zealand Technical Lead, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Working in groovy is great, so much less code! Grails has come a long way since I was a committer on it several years ago. The MVC structure is very easy to understand and the wide range of plugins make its quick to get projects going. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Keeping up to date with the best practice/best plugins can be challenging as the framework has changed a lot in the last few major versions. I also find it hard to stay disciplined in keeping my GSP DRY and not repeating a lot of common code. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Make sure you read the up to date documentation for your version and check that any online guids/tutorials/plugins are applicable to the latest version. Try to reduce duplication in your GSP by using the forms/bean-fields plugins. Also take a good like at resources pipeline stuff for managing/minifying JS and CSS. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it for internal administration application for our public facing system. It's foundation in Spring and Hibernate meant we could re-use a lot of our application data model code to quickly build administration screens. ### 6. Easy framework to work with, but does have its downfaills **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyler W. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** The speed at which you can develop is unparalleled in my experience as a full-stack web developer. Convention over configuration is heavily used within Grails and once you start to understand these 'rules' allow rapid development. I like the system they have in place to allow great separation of concerns (Views, Controllers, Services, client-side assets, config files, etc.). The groovy language is a joy to work with compared to traditional Java - some of the built-in methods feel very LINQ-like if you are familiar with C#. These really goes hand-in-hand with Grails GORM database wrapper that allows for terse querying/persistence. A huge plus is that changes to Class files can often be reloaded at runtime which makes development much faster than having to re-compile afterwards (this isn't perfect though). Spring is a huge part of Grails and has been very nicely integrated. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The documentation on many features within Grails is either sparse or nonexistent - many times I will receive an obscure error and dig heavily into old forums or framework source code to understand what is going on. The dynamic nature of Groovy certainly has its pluses but can lead to bad practices by coworkers that make reading code much harder than it needs to. The plugin ecosystem can be a nightmare when it comes to documentation and updates; but there are some gems out there as well (Spring Security, Asset-Pipeline). Grails support does seem to be waning with Spring Source dropping the project. The only IDE that really seems to work with Grails 3+ is IntelliJ ($$) but we are still using GGTS (Eclipse) with Grails 2.4 **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Depending on your needs, Grails could allow for rapid development but you must be willing to work your way through mediocre support to get there. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can't go into great detail, but our project involves a large internal website operating under the federal government. Function is more important to us than form. ### 7. Creating web applications and micro services with Grails, ranging from tiny to enterprise grade **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivo H. | Senior software architect & teamleader, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** - Compared with other Java frameworks, you typically write less then 50% code which vastly improves maintainability - Automatically generated and customizable CRUD pages - Large, complex applications can easily be split up into self-contained sub-applications **What do you dislike about Grails?** Breaking changes between Grails versions; upgrading to a newer version typically requires code changes **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** For modern web applications, I tend to use Grails only as a RESTfull backend (no GSP's) in combination with a React or Angular SPA. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Grails aids in rapid application development and shorter development cycles. Start a new project in just a minute and have the first prototype ready in no time. ### 8. Good framework for rapid applications development **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcin . | Software Engineer, Outsourcing/Offshoring, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** * convention over configuration * relatively easy to learn * many useful plugins * built on top of mature technologies (Spring, Hibernate) * Groovy-powered **What do you dislike about Grails?** * version 3 is not fully backward compatible * framework development is not so fast anymore, feels a bit forgotten recently **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I solve many business problems with Grails. Starting from video processing platform to social networks to e-commerce, B2B systems. The main benefits Grails provides me are high developer productivity and flat learning curve for new devs. ### 9. Grails review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I love the conventional approach to web application development that Grails brought. Grails gives you a very simple "interface" to the complicated components that underly it, such as Hibernate, Spring, and some template engine, for example. It does a good job of finding the sweet spot between making it very simple/fast to do common things, and not-so-difficult to do more specialized things. Grails is similar to Rails - in fact it was inspired by Rails. I loved the unit-testing support provided by the framework. It is quite easy to write tests for your Grails controllers and services. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Using frameworks like Grails tends to leave you with monolithic beasts over time. I've tended to favor toward an approach where the UI and server-side are divorced. For example, an architecture with a "REST"-ful back-end (almost no server-side rendering) along with single-page apps for the front-end. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Be careful of building large monolith. I personally would not use Grails view rendering (GSP) except for very basic things, because I prefer JS-based apps and a back-end design that does not assume anything about the front end. I.e., a service-oriented approach - endpoints that accept and return JSON, for example. Then I can write mobile apps, desktop web apps, etc.., that all talk to the same services. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** When I started using Grails, the speed with which you could build something was amazing, compared to other options available to me at the time (such as Oracle ADF, which just blows). That's very important. You want a developer to be able to get instant feedback on their work. To me, the development cycle was fantastic. It kept me in the zone. If, as developer, I'm forced to wait for my tools or wait for builds and such, I'm likely to get distracted and therefore be much less productive than I otherwise could be. ### 10. Simple and intuitive **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Clara Y. | Senior Frontend Developer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Understandable and easy syntax. Easy way to import services. Easy way to handle lists/arrays. A lot of plugins are available and easy to use. You can see changes only refreshing the page, no need to recompile witch saves a lot of time. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The only downside I found is that it's hard to find an IDE that can read the syntax without buying intelliJ **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Make application run faster. Make changes easy and fast. ### 11. Best Java Framework for Prototyping a product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I like the easiness of the framework. One can really get a quick start on a project. Even if someone has started the development, he can also take advantage of it to create a prototype quickly. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Black Boxed plugins. This is really a big challenge for us right now. Grails user should not depends up on the community driven plugin to fulfill their needs. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** The team should be well versed in OOPs and knows insight of each and every line written on Grails, else you will screw up the things **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Can't tell you the business problems but dealing with micro services based architecture was really of great help ### 12. awesome **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rohit B. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Convention over configuration, Less boilerplate code, Development is fun and very easy, I can focus more on business logic of the application rather then performing the framework ceremonies. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Debugging is hard sometimes, I hope it is improved in Grails3 **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are in a health care social integration business and always have very dynamic and custom requirements, Grails helps us to do the easily and very fast. ### 13. It was a great experience **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** It was my first professional job, it made it easier to start since it makes the stack simpler than using Java. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The community wasn't really big when I worked with Grails. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Grails was the right tool considering a JAVA expert team, it made it quicker to develop. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** New saas software for Google Adsense. Grails made it much faster do get an MVC done in comparison to JAVA. The development team didn't have much experience with saas development, grails reduced the stack complaxity. ### 14. Made my life a lot easier **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gerardo B. | Freelance - SEM Manager, Leisure, Travel & Tourism, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Grails is a great tool that made my life easier, really like Integrated ORM / NoSQL support. **What do you dislike about Grails?** I am a new user so im still learning about the tool. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to use platform. ### 15. About one year of work experience with grails 2.5 and 3.0 **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sergey L. | Java Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Super fast configuration for API, a lot of plugins **What do you dislike about Grails?** Grails community is too small, too little examples with a new technologies for the beginners **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Grails for development of backend. ### 16. A powerful framework to build Java web applications in a short time **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** scaffolding, spring/hibernate integrations, domain specific language for database queries **What do you dislike about Grails?** a lot of plugins that are not under active maintenance and obsolete. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** My last use of grails was meant for evaluation. No practical application so far. ## Grails Discussions - [What is Grails used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-grails-used-for) - [View Grails pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/grails/reviews?filters%5Bnps_score%5D%5B%5D=4§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-12+17%3A43%3A58+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=7dc234e0-d3eb-4ea8-a8e3-33eb9a1d23a8&secure%5Btoken%5D=8bcdd215b617e1bd6d81e77a848a4e552cfc9c1935eac5240d90eae85e91f679&format=llm_user) ## Top Grails Alternatives - [spring.io](https://www.g2.com/products/spring-io/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (291 reviews) - [Spark](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-spark/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (54 reviews) - [Vraptor](https://www.g2.com/products/vraptor/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (11 reviews)